Visualization of business processes, operation processes and the like in business process management (BPM) of an enterprise will be considered. Before the consideration, a business process and an operation process are defined as shown below:
Business process: a process to execute the core business of an enterprise that shows a structure and the flow of procedures and data to execute the core business.
Operation process: a process to support operation of a business process that shows a structure and the flow of procedures and data for daily operation of a business process such as operation management of an IT device.
Such business processes and operation processes (hereinafter, referred to as business/operation processes) may be described in a standard notation modeling language such as BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and UML (Unified Modeling Language). Accordingly, all people involved in business can easily understand business/operation processes and visualization can be promoted. Here, people involved in business include business analysts who create/update processes, engineers who implement processes, and managers who manage processes.
On the other hand, existing business/operation processes created previously include those that are not described in the above standard notation modeling language. More specifically, business/operation processes whose existing documents do not have uniform forms, those whose existing documents are inconsistent with the current operation, and those whose know-how is not properly documented exist. Moreover, business/operation processes are sometimes designed by relying on know-how of individual persons in charge of design and in such cases, business/operation processes are frequently not documented.
If the amount of information of such existing business/operation processes is enormous, an enormous amount of manpower will be needed to promote visualization of business/operation processes.